Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Life's Abyss and then You Die - An Interview with James Cameron

(originally published in Movieline Magazine)

James Cameron
looks much too relaxed for a man who has just made what may be the most
expensive motion picture ever made. The fate of an entire major studio
may rest on his shoulders, but he seems to shrug it off. Maybe he's just
relieved the whole mammoth production ordeal is over. Maybe he's giddy
over getting married next week to fellow director Katherine Bigelow. But
he's probably in such a good mood because in two more years he gets to
go to his twenty year high school reunion and casually mention that he
turned a short story he wrote as a student into a $50 million sci-fi
extravaganza. (And what have you done with your high school papers?)

The Abyss, which Cameron wrote and
directed, was a massive undertaking. It's certainly the most complex
underwater extravaganza ever filmed, and 20th Century Fox could have
sunk a real oil rig for the same cost as making it. But Cameron seems to
be a safer bet than oil. When he cranks up the cinematic pressure,
everybody in the theater stops nibbling popcorn and starts on their
fingernails. His chase sequences contain so much urgency that it's
surprising more people haven't had heart attacks while watching them. He
puts you in situations you really wouldn't want to be in, and he never
goes for the easy out. We go to his movies to face some deep primal fear
we didn't know we had; there are no cheap shocks in a Cameron film,
just a neverending onslaught of supreme danger.

Cameron is a
Corman alumnus who starting out as art director and production designer
for dozens of cheapo shlockos. He made his directorial debut with
another undersea adventure,
Piranha II - The Spawning, about which
the less said the better. It doesn't even appear on his resume, and who
can blame him when his second film was such a monster.

The Terminator
was a barrage of science fiction mayhem directed with non-stop momentum,
presenting a relentlessly bleak but visually fascinating vision of
tomorrow. Up until that time, it had been considered a drawback that
Arnold Schwarzenegger's performances were robotic. But Cameron cast him
impeccably as a killer cyborg from the future, and the film was an
enormous hit, giving both their careers a boost.

After writing the screenplay for
Rambo: First Blood II,
he then wrote and directed Aliens. It was an even bigger hit than its predecessor, earning seven academy award nominations and more than $180 million.

All this paved the way towards
The Abyss, a technological marvel full
of brilliant set pieces. The world is still dangerous, things can still
go wrong in the most unlikely ways, but Cameron's focus is more on
character than it's ever been. It's the couple that counts, not the
mysterious inexplicable force surrounding them.

The idea for the
film came from a science experiment that Cameron saw performed in high
school, which he eventually turned into a short story. "There was a guy
named Frank Felacek, a human guinea pig who actually breathed a liquid
in both lungs," Cameron explained from his posh hotel suite in Beverly
Hills. "They started with one lung and then the other. He thought he was
going to die, and everyone got real nervous, so they pumped the stuff
out of his lungs. It didn't work very well because a saline solution
couldn't hold enough oxygen. But later they started experimenting with
flourocarbon, and they've done it very successfully with dogs and
monkeys. The FDA won't let them use it in human experimentation, so the
research has sort of hit a wall, but the proposition is that if there
was ever a strong enough military application for it, it would proceed
again. In the film, when the rat breathes it, it's the real stuff, it's
really happening, the rat is breathing flourocarbons."

It's one of most
disconcerting visuals in the film, when Ed Harris seems to be breathing
liquid rather than air in a diving outfit that's full of water. It
looks like a truly death defying act, and you might assume that there
was hidden breathing apparatus somewhere in the suit. Wrong. "He just
had to hold his breath for a long time," said Cameron. "Any hidden
breathing apparatus would have leaked, so there would have been bubbles
coming up all the time. Ed didn't like it. It was very uncomfortable,
but I don't think it was ever really dangerous.

"In the film,
you see the helmet seal down into a neck ring that looks like one
integral unit. In actuality, the whole faceplate popped open on a hinge
and he would just breath through a standard regulator. When we were
ready for the take, the regulator would be removed, the bubbles would be
cleared away, and the faceplate would be closed. It had a very delicate
latch that could be easily over-ridden if necessary. It took a lot of
nerve, but Ed did almost all his own stunts. The wider shots where he's
tumbling down the wall are the only places where we doubled him."

I accused Cameron of being a victim of techno-lust and he laughed it off. "In
Good Morning, Vietnam, a guy says 'In my
heart, I know I'm funny.' Well in my heart, I know I don't have to do
science fiction. I think it's all these residual images from my
childhood, when I read science fiction voraciously, like Bradbury,
Clark, and Heinlein. It's such a visual form. I was always interested in
the fantastic, like the Sinbad films, anything with spectacular
mythological energy. I tend to be less interested in pure fantasy. I
like to be grounded in a sense of the possible, or at least creating an
illusion of the possible for the audience. In science fiction, there's
always the greater possibility to take people someplace they've never
been and showing them something they've never seen, more than there is
in a contemporary story set in Manhattan."

Will he ever
make a non-science fiction film? "I'm now being forced to realize that
that's a challenge I have to set for myself. I have to take people
someplace new, given relatively mundane props and visual set pieces. I
have to do it through psychology, through performance. I think I'm over
that threshold now. The scenes that people respond to the most are not
the techno-lust scenes. The two scenes right at the heart of the picture
which are the most emotionally intense, involve absolutely no support
from any mechanisms like special effects or production design. It's two
people talking in a four foot diameter tin can."

He's got that one right. In
The Shining, Stanley Kubrick was the
first to postulate that absolutely nothing is more frightening than a
husband and wife trapped together. Cameron takes this concept one step
further in
The Abyss, giving us one of the most harrowing life-or-death scenes of all time.

He takes an
estranged husband and wife who secretly love each other but whose
passion can only reveal itself through sarcasm - and puts them under
pressure. A lot of pressure - like at the bottom of the ocean in a leaky
two man submarine with only one set of diving gear. The leak can't be
fixed, and they've only got a few minutes till the whole sub is full of
water. One of them has got to die. They've probably both secretly wished
for the other's demise, but not like this. The one who lives will have
to watch the other drown. Close up.

Ed Harris and
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are so good in this scene, their fear and
devotion so raw and vital, that I can't think of any episode in any
other picture that rivals it in emotional intensity. It's so ferociously
performed that it overshadows the big special-effects finale. The alien
force becomes just a sub-plot. (Come to think of it, the whole film is a
sub plot)

I casually
mentioned something concerning the aliens, but Cameron is reluctant to
talk about the specifics of the ending. He doesn't want it given away,
and he wants the audience to figure it out for themselves. He also
dismisses any charges that the film is too derivative. "Most people
think if you're doing a story about human contact with a bad monster,
it's going to be
Alien, and if you're doing a story about
human contact with an intelligent species from another place that's
mysterious and strange, it's going to be
Close Encounters. I refuse to accept the
idea that there are only two choices left and nobody else can make a
film on any subject even remotely similar.
E.T.
and Close Encounters
are amazing and beautiful films. This film uses the concept in a different way."

"I think this is a less cynical picture than my others. I've always
been very positive about people and negative about trends. This film has
the same kind of balance between positiveness and paranoia. There's
still the paranoia of nuclear weapons, the potential for war, even
though we're in a 'glasnost' period. As long as the president of the
United States is the ex-head of the CIA, and the premiere of Russia is
the ex-head of the KGB, there's a limit to how much you can really
relax. Ultimately, it's a more optimistic picture because it deals with
people I see as positive role models."

In an attempt to play devil's advocate, I told Cameron one of the arguments against the film.
The Abyss
is essentially about a relationship between husband and wife. People who
are into relationship films don't necessarily go see big science
fiction films, and techno-nerds who go see big science fiction films
don't necessarily care about relationships.

His reply was
fast. "The counter argument to that would be that techno-nerds need love
too, and relationship people also live in a technical world. I don't
think there's a hard distinction between those two groups. There's a big
intersecting set of people in the middle who both acknowledge that we
live in a technological world and feel all those normal human emotions
that everybody feels. They have to address that in their lives as well. I
see it as a film for anybody living in the latter half of the twentieth
century who happens to be human, male or female. I hope that's not too
narrow a band."

I wanted to ask
him why the crew referred to the film as The Abuse. I wanted to ask him
why the alien neon hairdrier saved some people but not others. I wanted
to ask him about the water tentacles and what the film was really
about, but our time was up much too quickly.

He was dragged
to the door by a publicist, but before he left, I asked him one more
question. "If there's a water that men can breath, then why isn't there
an air that fish can breath?"